2026 May week 4
make ape game
May 18 to 24
1 - So if we return to the any-story game-maker, using our previous example of Does other life exist out there? , we simply access known data on actually documented organisms like tardigrades, which no longer wow us as microscopic survivor water bears everywhere, to still less expected blobfish which are actually normal looking deeply pressed under ocean, or the longest on Earth rope-like giant siphonophore. So many, so much Earth life bizarre beyond the usual birds and bugs and four-leggeds.
How would they adventure with life as we don’t usually know them, from our rigid silicon living fossils we proudly call artificial robots (which mean workers), to those naturally thriving in methane Titan lakes or molten underground magma?
And would they ever come into conflict against creatures that live too fast on the firm surfaces of neutron stars, or work with purple plants of an earlier time than chlorophyll green, making equipment and weapons out of them?
What would be their cultural goals and civilisational drives eventually? Would they like our carbon-water-chauvinistic ones of hoarding, oppression, and the delusion of control of the vast source by the elite going extinct?
2 - So I’ve planted the mega-apartments on a dusty, barren rock, the food aquariums of fish, the colossal extractors that grind crust and suck gases and melt ice. Plus the humongous waste dumps converted to bulk storage yards warehoused with stacks for trading, more to sell than to buy, and the rows of nuclear fusion reactors and radio telescope research farms, to run the conurbation and propel it forwards into future tech towards another terrestrial colony planet. Now what?
The roads criss cross in grid ahead into landscape, till visible horizonal limits, still ready but bare of use. Our circuit-breaker building stands by to ever re-connect after power outages, despite and not causing them. Money credits are meaninglessly accumulated faster than ever depleted, if not the simulation stops in reality, a source of both serious gameplay and intense study.
I do not lament that this does not seem to translate into real-world servitude of workaholism, and spending cash to splurge on luxuries declared as survival essentials. But what’s the point of all this - activity - if but to complete yet another human-ape life cycle?
